Into the new year, the half-decade-long armed conflict in Ukraine appears to have reached a major inflection point. The US wants out, even if it does not quite know how to get out. This, nevertheless, opens the prospect of a US-led peace initiative to replace the earlier US-led initiative to incorporate into NATO the Ukrainian flatlands
Russian alarm over NATO reaching its very doorstep is rooted in the experience of a millennium during which Russia was repeatedly and successively invaded by Teutonic Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, Napoleonic France, and Hitler’s Germany—all using the plains of Ukraine as the staging ground. That is the background and explanation (if not justification) for Russia’s pre-emptive invasion of the Ukrainian plains to forestall NATO from extending its military threat right to its doorstep
However, instead of the quick, decisive military victory that Vladimir Putin confidently expected over Ukraine, Russia’s invasion has stalled at virtually the geographical, linguistic, and cultural dividing line between West-leaning western Ukraine and East-leaning eastern Ukraine
At the present juncture, the battlefield deadlock has opened the route for two alternative outcomes: either an armistice/peace agreement brokered by superpower honchos Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, over the heads of the Ukrainian combatants backed by west European belligerents; or the continuation of armed hostilities with a rejuvenated west Europe taking over military leadership from the reluctant Americans, thus converting the last Cold War battlefield confrontation into a European civil war.
The third alternative, advocated by such British scholars as Professor Emeritus Richard Sakwa of the University of Canterbury, and conforming to the analysis of independent American scholars such as Jeffrey Sachs, is for a Europe-led rapprochement between Russia and Ukraine, perhaps through the emergence of a north Eurasian confederation that would terminate centuries of internecine European wars, which have only ever ended in mutual ruin, with a view to ushering in a new era of pan-continental peaceful cooperation.
In other words, it would mark the end of three-quarters of a century of US-fuelled, NATO-led trans-Atlantic confrontation, first with the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation, which has troubled a divided Europe since virtually the end of the Second World War in 1945, and replace it with a European-owned peace initiative that would bring an end to the confrontational divide between east and west Europe
Interestingly, as Sachs has underlined, far from being a fanciful, new, out-of-the-box innovation, the idea of a united Europe as an essential component of a cooperative and peaceful post-bellum world order was the core of the agreements reached at Potsdam between the “collective West” and a resolute Soviet Union, which had almost single-handedly turned the military tables against Nazi Germany at a cost of over 20 million Russian lives
Mark Rutte, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), addressing the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, on January 26.
| Photo Credit:
SIMON WOHLFAHRT
Had Franklin D. Roosevelt lived, a global post-war peace, anchored in a united but disarmed and neutral Germany as a buffer between east and west Europe, might well have emerged as the basic geopolitical reality. Even as late as 1952, Joseph Stalin actually applied for Soviet membership of NATO, only to be peremptorily turned down by an increasingly truculent US that fed revanchist west Europeans still fighting the Russian “barbarians” of yore
Is any of this relevant to South Asians fighting their own histories and deadlocked in their vain effort to either establish a South Asian hegemon to work under or work their way to peaceful co-existence? Surprisingly, yes—at several levels of comparison over almost exactly the same one thousand years of European fracturing that have etched the religio-political fracturing of South Asia into what might otherwise have been a pan-continental Asian renaissance and resurgence to match Sakwa’s dreams for his own part of the world.
At one level, Sakwa unearths the deep and layered roots of west Europe’s ancient dread of Russia that animates Ukrainian nationalism and statehood. This view believes that all that is required for Ukraine to acquire its “primordial” national identity is to end “the occlusions of Russian colonialism” as well as Polish and Lithuanian “dominance” that constitute this morbid version of Ukrainian history
South Asian readers will immediately recognise in this the Hindutvist version of a violated Bharat Mata shedding the “occlusions” of 666 years of Muslim dominance on the throne of Delhi (1192-1858), as well as British (Christian) colonialism in South Asia paralleling the Ukrainian experience of egregious foreign rule. Shedding these “occlusions”, thus, becomes the primary means and ends of Hindutva revivalist nationalism as with Ukrainian revanchists
According to Sakwa, the alternative vision of Ukraine is to understand the “hybridity” of the colonial encounter and develop a “vision” of Ukrainian nationalism as “pluralistic, tolerant, muti-lingual, and multi-confessional”, paralleling Jawaharlal’s Nehru’s “Idea of India” in juxtaposition to the narrower Hindutvist vision of India as a uni-confessional, and preferably unilingual, uni-cultural Hindu nation
We in India would use the alternative synonym of “synthesis” to describe our cultural encounters with the outside world. In the Nehruvian view, our “trackless centuries” of living together as possibly the most highly diverse inhabitants of a single historical, geographic, and even ideational space has been to provide a global exemplar of “absorption, assimilation, and synthesis” as the civilisational answer to diverse indigenous traditions interacting with outside civilisational influences until all are fused in the underlying concept at the basis of our modern nationhood: “unity in diversity” as opposed to “unity through uniformity”.
When the “hybridity” of our historical evolution as a composite Indic civilisation is denied, as at the time of the 1947 separation on religious grounds of Pakistan from India on the advocacy of a wholly synthetic “two-nation theory” propagated as avidly by Muslim extremists as by Hindu extremists, and the 1971 partition of Pakistan caused by the brutal oppression of their own demographic majority by West Pakistan’s militarily stronger demographic minority, the “hybridity” of inter-cultural encounters acquires the contours of political and military rivalry and confrontation, and eventually ends in war, despite what Sakwa terms a “shared history”.
I would go further and describe the nation-states of South Asia as having a “shared composite civilisation”
At the site of an apartment building that was hit by Russian drone strikes, during Russia’s attack in Odesa, Ukraine, on January 27.
| Photo Credit:
Nina Liashonok
At another level, Sakwa has identified in Ukraine outside Western powers promoting narrow Ukrainian nationalism to foster their own confrontation with Russia. We see such a “foreign hand” operating in South Asia as well, especially when Western interests are involved (as in Afghanistan from the early 1970s until a couple of years ago, when the Taliban triumphed)
But, compared to the congeries of small and weak east European states bordering the Russian Federation on its western front, such a foreign hand has been relatively less ubiquitous, or perhaps less successful, in South Asia (excepting Pakistan and Afghanistan) than in the CIA-engineered “colour revolutions” that swept east Europe and the Caucasian republics after the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, thus creating the conditions for the current vicious war
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The “root causes” of the Ukrainian confrontation with the Russian Federation are thus, argues Sakwa, “a tangled web of interlocking conflicts and ideas”, the only answer to which is a “pan-European security system” that does not make Ukraine a “frontline” but integral to such a security system
This is exactly what will work in South Asia: not a frontline being drawn on India’s frontiers with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China, but a well-integrated South Asian security system (including, if such a leap of imagination is allowed, at least the Autonomous Region of Tibet if not all of distant mainland China) that ends the serial confrontations between India and its neighbours, that extend even to Hindu-majority Nepal and, from time to time, Sri Lanka and The Maldives
A South Asian union of sovereign states is the most imaginative long-term solution to needless internecine conflict in what ought to be a united, resurgent South Asia, partnering neighbours in the rest of Asia
I doubt that Modi-Jaishankar would even begin to understand this, their preferred approach being pronouncing “This is not an era of war” before launching Operation Sindoor and keeping it open-ended. Yet, even as one hopes that the duo’s dominance is nearing its end, it may be time to think seriously about bold alternatives
Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009
